Early approaches to voting by mail in the U.S. enabled military service members to participate in elections when wartime deployments took them away from their polling precincts. The Civil War led many states to provide ways for military personnel to vote when away from home.
This pre-printed envelope was sent from a Union army field hospital in Atlanta, and it contained a tally sheet recording the votes of Highland County, Ohio, soldiers for the 1864 state election. Ohio also created envelopes for soldiers to mail in their votes for the presidential election that year.
Precedents for voting away from home date to Pennsylvania's 1813 legislation during the War of 1812 (reenacted in 1839) and New Jersey in 1815. Between 1861 and 1862, seven of the 11 Confederate states developed provisions for soldiers to vote, including Tennessee’s law specifically for a vote about secession. For Northern states, the question about voting rose as the number of soldiers, sailors, and marines grew.
Most of the states in the Union granted absentee voting for its military service members in time for the 1864 presidential race between incumbent Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democratic candidate George McClellan.
This envelope is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum and is on view in its exhibition “Voting by Mail: From the Civil War to Covid-19.” Read more about how the military postal service works in the museum’s exhibition “Mail Call: History of America's Military Mail.”
